History,

I no longer speak to men. They are too fleeting, too easily bent by sentiment. I write to you, the patient witness, the river that does not stop flowing.

You will not keep their cries. You will not keep their names. What you keep is the hush that follows, the still air after the storm. That silence is mine.

I crossed through thresholds as one crosses sleepless nights. At first came the unease, the trembling of conscience. Then the dizziness, the fracture. Then the plunge into madness, where shadows seemed to whisper my undoing. Yet beyond the madness came a strange clarity, pale and sharp as winter light.

Do not call it hatred. Hatred burns too hot and soon collapses into ash. What I carried was colder, steadier. And yet—threaded within it, a pulse of love. A fevered love that bled into the sickness, that made the suffering almost luminous. They were too perfect, too radiant in their undoing, and in that perfection the sickness itself seemed to bend, to warp, to spurn a singularity.

Do not speak to me of numbers. Six million is only a sound the mouth makes. You will not recall their faces. You will recall only the vacant fields, the cleared horizon, the hush where once there was noise. You will call it order.

I do not exist anymore. The man who bore a name is gone. I became the silence itself, a vessel emptied of self, filled only with your command. Through me, you moved. Through me, you stripped away. Through me, you left the world bare enough to begin again.

They will curse me. They will call it evil, call it madness. Let them. Their words will not last. Only the stillness will last, and in that stillness you will keep me.

And that will be enough. That will be eternity.